Wednesday, May 04, 2005

First of all, our deepest condolences to the families of the victims of today's massacre in Erbil. May God bless the souls of those who have fallen while trying to protect their city and their people and we wish those who gut injured a fast recovery.

Sandmonkey thinks that the government's story regarding the latest attack in Cairo has many holes in it.After he logically discusses some of these holes he declares that the contract between the people and the government is no longer valid and that the people want their freedom back.

We, Egyptians, forsake a lot of our liberty for the sake of our security and they are not keeping their end of the bargain. Say what you say about the American Patriot act, but there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. The American government has clearly kept its end of the bargain, the Egyptian government seems incapable of it, so we should no longer keep ours. They can’t protect us; It’s time to get our freedom back!

I have talked many times about the close resemblance between Syria and Iraq (pre-liberation Iraq of course) but this article by Karfan and friend abolishes the few differences I thought existed between Arab countries tyrranical regimes; they're identical twins, I swear!Reading this article took me back to Iraq in 2002; every single tiny detail is exactly the same; the army, the Ba'ath party and its hateful regional convention, the worn out-slogans and the numbness you can see clearly on many faces.

Maybe the only difference lies in the cars! The Mukhabarat drive white Peugeot cars in Syria while in Iraq they used to have white Toyotas and in stead of a Range Rover being the dream of Syrian officers, Iraqi officers' dream was a Nissan Patrol.

Al-Sabah is conducting a new opinion poll and till no 1590 people have said their opinion about this question:What is the task Jafari's government has to handle first?

The answers came like this:

1-providing security 55.16% (877 votes)

2-dealing with unemployment 3.08% (49 votes)

3-getting the foreign troops out 4.97% (79 votes)

4-improving public services 1.26 (20 votes)

5-applying Shareat law 1.01% (16 votes)

6-writing the constitution 5.47 (87 votes)

7-providing more houses 1.51% (24 votes)

8-fighting terrorism 11.45% (182 votes)

9-fighting corruption 4.78% (76 votes)

10-Saddam's trial 10.06% (160 votes)

11-don't know 1.26% (20 votes)

I think that not all of the questions were well selected because "fighting terrorism" is part of the more general task of "providing security" and "writing the constsution" is not the duty of the cabinet.

However this poll shows (like some previous ones) some intersting findings; the most important one is that it shows that Iraqis are not fond of Shareat laws at all and that a low percentage of Iraqis consider ending the presence of foreign troops one of their priorities for this period of the transitional phase.

Also, it shows that unemployment is not a major concern as well while I noticed an increase in the demands for more efforts to be done to improve security (when compared with similar polls conducted immediately after the January elections) and this-in my opinion-is attributed to the increased frequency of terror attacks recently.

By the way, I was interviewed (via e mail) by Mr. Ghost a few days ago. You can take a look at the interview here.